What did I do this past week? I finished up the Darwin project. At first I thought the “no getters and setters” rule would be difficult to sustain, but some critical thinking led to a clever (and mostly effective) design.

What’s in my way? I’ve got a busy weekend ahead! A 5K to run, a trip to Microsoft, and a Compilers project are all in the pipe. Plus, of course, the usual homework and reading here and there. And so, I’ll have to keep this post fairly short.

What will I do next week? Finalizing my Compilers project (a Pascal code parser) and riding the rollercoaster that will be Election Day (and week). If you’ve ever wondered about the magic of turning code into machine-code gobbledygook, then Compilers will make you a magician. No wand required.

We learned about move this week. And it’s actually… pretty awesome. I wrote a few weeks ago about how I thought deallocation in destructors was clever. The idea of shoving all my unwanted goods into the tomb of the stack frame is equally ingenious. It all makes me 1) appreciate the smart people in the world that came up with such a strategy and wrote all the library code to make it work with the containers we’ve discussed in class and 2) wonder what else is up Professor Downing’s sleeves.

Tip of the Week: I recently got access to a 3D Printer, which motivated me to start learning CAD software again so I can print out my own custom plastic trinkets. Unfortunately the student edition of SolidWorks isn’t exactly cheap (AND it’s 12-month subscription based), so I decided to explore some free options instead. Enter FreeCAD: it’s free, multiplatform, and open source, with a heart of C++ and padded with Python armor.

It’s worth checking out not just for general purpose use, but also as an open source project to contribute to, with a healthy amount of documentation for each supported platform. Initial results look promising: